Why are installs so Slow
While in a chatroom this morning I learned the reason why Solaris installs are so slow. It turns out that pkgadd is really slow on installing small packages, well it turns out that Solaris installs about 10,000 little packages in a full install.
My idea was perhaps make pkgadd handle small packages better.
Alanc: the pkgadd team is working on that, but right now, every package added causes it to have to rewrite all of /var/sadm/install/contents in sorted order, so it gets to be like an additional 10MB of disk i/o for every single pkg added
Ouch was the group reaction to this little bombshell.
Alanc: which is why they tried going to sqlite in S10, but that made it even slower on small memory systems
So yes its being worked on. But it’s a long standing design flaw best that exists because.
Alanc: AT&T certainly wasn't planning for 10,000 packages when they created the SVR4 system
posted by jamesd_wi at Thursday, March 23, 2006
1 Comments:
Actually, it's about 10,000 files, not packages. The number of packages is around 1000. The problem is that the contents file gets overwritten every time a new package gets installed.
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